Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/196

 him weak and ashamed of taking offense for having felt himself ignored by her.

"I'd have come long ago, Marjorie, if I'd had any idea you'd have any use for me."

"Perhaps you couldn't have helped, Gregg. Billy didn't. Oh, he's been perfectly fine to me! He's tried to help me in his best way; but he has the most prodigious principles. And having principles, Gregg, isn't much help in a fix like mine. I suppose, if you have them, you're bound to apply them, yet you can't—to more than one thing at a time. They simply won't work with each other."

"I'm glad I haven't any then," Gregg said, attempting to laugh.

She attempted it too; but failed and, as they walked on and he kept his clasp of her, he felt her shivering, though, under her cape, she could not be cold. It was barely cool that night; for since the evening that Billy and Gregg had driven from Chicago on a snow-covered road, spring had established itself; and with darkness, even the brisk, April breeze which during the day had blown from the lake, had given way to a warm, limpid wind from the west, smelling of the damp, fresh-ploughed loam of the farmlands and of green budding bush and tree. That damp odor in the air suddenly returned Gregg in feeling to the freight car in which he had fought Russell; then his thought jumped to Mrs. Russell, and he wondered how two women, dwelling not seven miles apart and not seven years separated in years, could take a fact of life as differently as this girl quivering beside him and she who so coolly and steadily had sat opposite him at lunch and asserted her "what I have, I hold."

He let go Marjorie's arm and felt for his cigarette